Kelly McParland: The gridlock that devoured Toronto

When I was a punk kid with a new drivers licence, about 40 years ago, you could zip into Toronto by car from Mississauga (which had only recently been invented) in about half an hour. Maybe less if you hurried.

The QEW was divided by a grassy strip with trees on it, instead of concrete barriers. There was a big hump at the Humber River, where you veered around the stolid statue of Queen Victoria. There was nothing between the Gardiner and the shoreline except some low, ugly buildings. There were three exits into the city: at Spadina, Yonge/York and Jarvis.

Everything has changed since then. The grass is gone. The hump was removed. The statue was hauled off to a park. And the low ugly buildings were replaced by dozens of big ugly buildings, effectively blocking off access to the water in precisely the way city officials used to warn should never be allowed to happen. The buildings are filled with condos, which are filled with tens of thousands of downtown dwellers.

The only thing that’s the same is the three, measly, two-lane exits from the highway, which now lead through crowded urban neighbourhoods as thick as the smoked meat in a Montreal sandwich. Forget about traffic flow on the highway into town. Forget about the mess that has become of the downtown road system. Getting from one to the other — just a couple of hundred yards as the crow flies — is a nightmare.

The three exits were never easy. All it took was one car to stall in the tunnel under the railway tracks and traffic slammed to a halt. An accident closing both lanes meant a back-up of epic proportions. And that was before someone got the bright idea of turning the city south of King Street into cond0-mania, with unit on unit stacked one beside the other, filled with hip young urbanites intent on expressing their God-given right to bike, walk, text, skateboard or just generally wander at random wherever their little hearts should take them, scowling at the nasty cars that persist in cluttering up the road. The other day I drove down Bay Street and turned right onto King. A youthful financier in an expensive suit, deep into his BlackBerry, screeched to a halt in his shiny shoes, shot me a look and started waving his arms at me. Imagine, turning right on a green light.

There is probably a web site somewhere that has calculated how much more traffic there is trying to get in and out of central Toronto than there used to be before the condos came, but at a guess, I’d say it’s a factor of a gazillion or so. Plus all the people. Yet the city has done nothing, in 40 years, to try even slightly to allow for the increase. You get off at the same three exits, which lead to the same three narrow streets, which now pass through three semi-permanent construction zones.

There are signs against parking, but apparently every delivery van, mini-bus, courier service and taxi is exempted from paying any attention. Drivers simply stop wherever they want and leave the vehicle behind while they head off to wherever, turning two lanes into one and doubling the challenge to any poor sod who is just trying to get from Front to Lakeshore. The single short stretch of York between the railway tracks and the Gardiner — barely a block long — now has three condos, and office building, a supermarket, a liquor store and a giant bar, not to mention the Air Canada Centre where, I hear, there can be occasional large events that attract a lot of traffic. Just to make life easier, Bremner Ave., across from the ACC entrance, is being turned into a new mammoth condo zone leading to the Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays play.

All to be served by the one lousy little exit at York, and the already impassable one at Spadina, which has been sprinkled with stoplights coordinated to ensure permanent gridlock. This week it was identified as one of the worst congestion areas in the city, a designation that could apply to just about everything from Spadina to Jarvis.

Personally I think it’s great that the area north of the Gardiner has been transformed into a sports and entertainment centre. And it’s always diverting driving past glass-walled condo units that enable you to look right into someone’s bedroom a few yards away while you’re crawling past on the highway. But it’s nonsensical to do all that, and still limit access to three narrow, outdated, overwhelmed exits built for a city less than half the size. It’s not an issue of cars versus transit. Even if you love transit and hate cars, it makes no sense to create a permanent state of gridlocked vehicles pumping emissions into a confined space walled with highrises to keep it there. The city is desperate for revenue, yet still makes little effort to enforce traffic and parking laws that could ease congestion and bring in plenty more revenue if enforced.

If the idea is that, by making life miserable, cars will stay away, it hasn’t worked. The misery is already there, stuck behind another bus.